An embedded system design for a two-axis camera platform control used in unmanned aerial vehicles

摘要

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to perform various tasks such as product delivery, aerial photography, surveillance and precision agriculture has become increasingly common. Most of the UAV applications use cameras to carry out these tasks. Generally, the cameras are stabilized by platforms known as gimbals, i.e. camera platform, which in turn must react to UAV attitude to minimize the disturbance in the camera. Therefore, the gimbal control becomes essential to allow capturing stable pictures and videos with almost no image processing. Considering this context, this paper introduces a low-cost (i.e., ≈ USD 110) embedded system design and implementation for a two-axis camera platform control used in UAVs. The proposed implementation takes into account the background of three different domains: mechanical, computing and electronics. The main goal is to have a gimbal able to stabilize a camera, with respect to UAV attitude, using permanent magnetic synchronous motors as actuators. Our design also uses an inertial measurement unit (IMU) as a sensor and a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller. Simulated and experimental results show that the developed embedded system was able to successfully respond to a simulated UAV flight envelope, reacting in real-time and minimizing those disturbances.